KEY TO THE fate of knowledge is the idea of curation. The term has sacred beginnings. It means ‘to look after’ and as a noun it commonly refers to a priest who ‘looks after’ parishioners. Priests are said to have the ‘cure of souls’ or the spiritual care of their flock. Across many Christian denominations an assistant priest is still called a ‘curate’. Curators in libraries or museums have the responsibility to look after the objects in their care. In the case of librarians this responsibility extends to the notion of knowledge itself: the intellectual material contained within the object. The act of curating can involve decisions about what to collect in the first place, and also how to collect; what to keep and what to discard (or destroy); what to make instantly available and what to keep closed for a period of time.
The decision of whether to destroy or preserve a personal archive may be crucial. Thomas Cromwell, in the 1530s, maintained a large archive of personal documents, mostly in the form of correspondence, which enabled him to exercise his duties for Henry VIII, a period where the administration of the country went through a massive process of modernisation. Cromwell’s own archive was naturally well organised and extensive, but we know this only through the part of it that survives (now split between the National Archives and the British Library). Personal archives will naturally contain the incoming correspondence, but in the early modern period secretaries in households would also make copies of all of the outgoing correspondence as well, in order to maintain control over both sides of the flow of information; ‘so meticulous a mind as Cromwell’s would have made sure his letters were there, ready for reference in case of need.’ The fact that only the incoming correspondence survives leads to the inevitable conclusion that ‘such a vast loss of the out-tray can only be the result of deliberate destruction’.1
At the time of Cromwell’s fall from grace in the eyes of Henry VIII, and his arrest in June 1540, his staff began to destroy the copies of their master’s outgoing letters, in case they might incriminate him. Holbein’s famous portrait of Cromwell shows him looking off to the left, almost in profile. There is a weight of seriousness and a severity about him. He is dressed in a black fur-lined coat and a black hat. His plain clothes offer no clue to his personality. Rather than wealth or privilege this picture displays his grasp of knowledge: he is literally clutching a legal document tightly in his left hand, and on the table in front of him is a book. It is not the room or Cromwell’s clothes that display wealth and power, but this volume, with its gold-tooling on the leather covers: the book is even kept tight by two gilded clasps. The painter is showing us what Cromwell felt was truly important.
Cromwell’s archive of outgoing correspondence was destroyed in a domestic setting – the office in his private home. The domestic environment still witnesses the destruction of knowledge on a daily basis. My wife and I have had to clear the home of a family member, uncovering letters, photographs and diaries. We had to make decisions about which of these should be destroyed, and there were a number of very valid and legitimate reasons for doing this, which countless other families have had to encounter. The content may be too inconsequential, or take up too much space to keep, or it may refer to episodes which bring back unhappy memories for surviving family members, or reveal new knowledge that descendants, discovering for the first time, may wish to hide for ever.
Such personal decisions are made every day, but occasionally the decisions made about the fate of documents may have profound consequences for society and culture, especially when the deceased is well known in public life. Those left behind after the death of a loved one sometimes have to make decisions about the fate of personal archival material – letters and diaries especially – that have subsequently had a major impact on literary history. These decisions have often been made to save the reputation of the deceased but also to save the reputation of those who remain. It is in this sense that I argue that these acts are actually ‘political’: that is, concerned with the exercise of power – power over the public reputation, and over what becomes public and what remains private.
Private diaries and journals are now, in the digital age, kept less often, but they were a great cultural phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Correspondence is still a major feature of personal communication but this happens now predominantly through email and digital messaging: private correspondence can often be as revealing as the private journal or diary. The writer may also keep the early sketches, drafts and versions of their literary production, and these are equally valued by the scholars and critics attempting to understand the process of literary creation. Personal archives of this kind can also include other materials: financial records (such as account books, which shed light on the success or failure of various literary enterprises), photograph albums (which can show aspects of personal relationships which letters do not reveal), and ephemera of various kinds (theatre programmes or magazine subscriptions can be illuminating to literary scholars). The shelves of the Bodleian’s special collections stacks are full of boxes of such fascinating material, and include some of our most popular collections – the papers of such figures as Mary and Percy Shelley, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, Bruce Chatwin, Joanna Trollope and Philip Larkin, among many others.
The deliberate destruction of literary papers by the author is a kind of extreme self-editing. It is done with an eye to posterity. So too are the acts of defiance of those wishes. This notion that the future will take a critical view of the past is one that underpins much of the motivation for attacks on libraries and archives throughout history.
Writers have been tempted to destroy their own writings since the dawn of time. In antiquity, the Roman poet Virgil, so the account of his biographer Donatus goes, wanted to consign the manuscript of his great (but at this point unpublished) epic the Aeneid to the flames. As he lay dying in Brindisi, according to this account,
he had proposed … that Varius [Virgil’s great friend and poet] should burn the Aeneid if anything should happen to him, but Varius said he would not do it. Thus in the last stages of his illness he constantly called for his book-boxes, meaning to burn it himself, but when no one brought them to him he took no specific measures about it.2
Later writers and scholars have interpreted this account in different ways. Some have viewed it as a supreme act of humility: Virgil saw no merit in his work and wanted to see it destroyed. Others have said that the decision was the darkly neurotic act of a man in torment, an act of supreme self-curation. A third interpretation views the event as part of the forming of a literary reputation by passing the decision into the hands of another, who takes on the role of ‘curator’. In this case the patronage of Augustus is key to Virgil, as it was the Emperor of Rome himself who saved this great classic for the future, and with it Virgil’s reputation.
These different interpretations can be applied to the decisions made about the manuscripts – and reputations – of much later writers. Lord George Gordon Byron, for example, was arguably the most famous writer of the early nineteenth century. ‘Notorious’ might be a better description of his reputation. As a young man he travelled extensively in the Mediterranean, falling in love especially with Greece, which he felt should be freed from Turkish dominion. He came to the attention of the literati with his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), which was a powerful work of satirical literary criticism in response to the hostile reviews of his juvenile volume of verse Hours of Idleness (1807). He continued to write poetry as he got older, the first serious volume of which was Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a kind of literary journey in verse. The book was published in parts as Byron completed writing each canto. The first two cantos were published in 1812; he famously remarked following its publication, ‘I awoke … and found myself famous.’ He published more poetry including The Bride of Abydos (1813) and The Corsair (1814), but his masterpiece was Don Juan (the first two cantos of which were published in 1819). Byron’s ill-fated marriage, in 1815, to Annabella Milbanke produced a daughter, the pioneering mathematician Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815–52). (The Bodleian’s archives include the correspondence between mother and daughter.) Byron’s other daughter, Allegra, with Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley, died aged five of typhus or malaria.
Byron’s lifestyle brought him celebrity status and invitations to elite circles in London, but his fame grew with his tempestuous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb and his alleged affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh (with whom he was widely reputed to have fathered another child, Medora). In 1816, at the height of his notoriety, Byron left England for Europe, at first for Geneva (entertaining Percy and Mary Shelley in his villa at Cologny, on the shores of Lake Geneva, and where Mary created the Frankenstein story in a party game). After this sojourn at Cologny, one of the great literary sleepovers in history, Byron continued to travel around Italy with the Shelleys, and wrote and published poetry throughout. His friendship with Percy Shelley was a constant feature of this period, ending tragically when Shelley drowned on the way home from a visit to friends, after his beloved sailing boat, which he had begrudgingly named Don Juan, for Byron, got into difficulties during a storm off the coast of Viareggio.
All aspects of Byron’s life became the subject of gossip and comment: even his pets – he accumulated a menagerie while in Italy: ‘ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it’, according to Shelley.3 Byron moved on to his beloved Greece in 1824, where he died later that year of fever. Such a creative, productive but sensational life made Byron immensely famous all over the world. His death was a source of grief among the writers and poets. Tennyson recalled later in life that ‘I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: BYRON IS DEAD!’4
His poetry was widely read in Germany, France and America, as well as in Britain, and despite his notoriety, and the scandal that surrounded him, his friends and literary admirers maintained a passionate loyalty, amounting almost to a cult. It was this cult status that was to have an effect on the treatment of his private papers.
All through Byron’s career as an author, it was the London publishing house of John Murray that brought his work to the public. Founded in 1768 by the first John Murray, there would be seven men of that name who would successively run the house until 2002 when it ceased to be a private publishing enterprise and became part of the Hachette group. Until the sale of the firm, the house was based in handsome premises at 50 Albemarle Street, just off London’s Piccadilly. The building is still used for literary gatherings, and one can still climb the elegant but creaky staircase to the drawing room on the first floor, still panelled and lined with bookshelves. Above the fireplace is a portrait of Byron. When standing in this room, it feels as if the conversations between publisher and author have only just finished.5
John Murray II was a brilliant publisher, making good decisions about which authors to publish, and how to reflect and shape the mood of the times with the authors the firm established in the early nineteenth century. This list included James Hogg, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jane Austen. Murray’s relationship with Byron was especially close, although subject to ups and downs, as the impecunious writer relied on the publisher for advice, support and funding. In 1819, in the midst of public controversy surrounding Byron’s Don Juan, the writer gave a manuscript of his private memoirs to his friend Thomas Moore, an Irish writer then living in England, encouraging him to circulate it among any friends whom Moore considered ‘worthy of it’. Those who read the memoirs at some point included Percy and Mary Shelley, the Irish poet Henry Luttrell, and novelist Washington Irving, as well as his friends such as Douglas Kinnaird and Lady Caroline Lamb. Knowing that Moore was seriously in debt, Byron later suggested that he sell the manuscript, to be published after Byron’s death. In 1821 John Murray agreed to pay Moore an advance on the understanding that Moore would edit the memoirs for publication. Crucially, Murray took possession of the manuscript of the memoir itself.6
After Byron’s death in Greece became known in London in May 1824, the memoirs began to take on a different status. The intimate circle of Byron’s friends who had read them did not include members of his immediate family. Battle lines were soon drawn between those who thought the memoirs ought to be published and those (such as John Cam Hobhouse, one of Byron’s friends, and John Murray) who thought that it would stir up such moral disgust in public opinion that Byron’s reputation, and those of his surviving relatives, would be irreparably damaged. William Gifford, the editor of the influential Quarterly Review, thought them ‘fit only for a brothel and would damn Lord Byron to certain infamy if published’.7
Those who did not object to publishing the memoirs may have been swayed by the financial gain that could be achieved. Moore attempted to renege on the arrangement with Murray, as he thought he could make more money by taking the manuscript to another publisher. John Cam Hobhouse knew that Moore was trying to publish it for maximum personal gain but felt that Byron’s family should be the ones to decide whether to publish or not. Hobhouse was not alone. He wrote in his diary on 14 May 1824: ‘I called on Kinnaird, [who] very generously wrote a letter to Moore offering him £2,000 at once in order to secure the MSS in whose hands it was, for the family of Lord Byron – that is to say, in order to destroy the same MSS.’8 Douglas Kinnaird was another close friend of Byron, who had been given power of attorney by the poet, looking after his financial affairs after he left England for the last time in 1816. This letter put Moore in a difficult position and he began to waver from his position of seeking to publish the memoirs for his personal gain, suggesting that a ‘chosen number of persons’ would decide the fate of the manuscript. Murray also wanted the memoirs destroyed and Hobhouse urged him to go through his own correspondence with Byron and destroy any compromising letters. Fortunately for us, Murray resisted this urge.
The matter came to a head on Monday 17 May 1824. Moore and his friend Henry Luttrell attempted to appeal directly to the men managing the affairs of Byron’s sister and his widow, Robert Wilmot-Horton and Colonel Frank Doyle. They had agreed to meet at 50 Albemarle Street, the residence of John Murray, at 11 a.m. The men gathered in the front drawing room and it wasn’t long before personal insults were flying, with accusations of the honour of gentlemen being insulted, alongside the core issue regarding the fate of the manuscript. Eventually the document was brought into the room by Murray along with a copy that had been made by Moore. What exactly happened next is unclear but the manuscript was ultimately torn up and burned in the fire in the drawing room.
The burning must have taken some time, as it was at least 288 pages long (we know this because the binding of the copy survives, still with blank pages, which begin at page 289). The destruction, from the various accounts of the participants, was finally acceded to by Wilmot-Horton and Doyle, acting on behalf of Augusta and Annabella – although it seems not with their express permission. Although Murray was the legal owner of the manuscript, he made the destruction possible, and could have resisted it on his own (with or without Moore’s own pleading).
Both Murray’s and Hobhouse’s motivations were probably mixed. Hobhouse, recently elected an MP, may well have been anxious to protect his own reputation from association with Byron. Both may have been jealous that the poet had entrusted Moore with the memoirs and not them. For Murray, there was also a heightened sense of his own status in society – by siding with Byron’s family he may have been trying to portray himself as a gentleman rather than a tradesman. The weight of moral feeling would have been an equally forceful influence on Murray, but he had to weigh up the short-term commercial gain of publishing the memoirs against the potential damage that association with a morally dubious publication would bring. The publishing house of John Murray was still in its infancy. It would survive thanks to a mixture of prudence and taking risks. On this occasion, risk lost the day.9 It says something about the power of his friends’ concern for the future, and their need to control history, that no copy of Byron’s memoirs has come to light since the original was burned in the grate of 50 Albemarle Street.
If Byron’s friends took the ultimate curatorial decision to save his reputation by destroying his memoirs, such decisions can take a different turn, and the close friends of a writer can sometimes disobey the wishes of their friend. The writer Franz Kafka left very similar orders to those of Virgil to his executor Max Brod who, like Varius, decided to disobey his friend. Kafka is now regarded as one of the greatest and most influential writers of all time.
Franz Kafka had embarked on a career as a writer but had published relatively little by the time of his death in 1924. In the last year of his life, Kafka, plagued by tuberculosis, embarked on a serious relationship with a young woman, Dora Diamant, whom he had met in the German seaside resort of Graal-Müritz, where they had both attended a Jewish summer camp. Diamant fell in love with Kafka the person, and not Kafka the writer, and was apparently unaware that he had written The Trial (written originally in German as Der Prozess) until it was published posthumously in 1925. After a brief return to his home town of Prague, in September 1923, Kafka went to live for a time in Berlin, and was joined there by Diamant, where they set up home together in the suburb of Steglitz, to the dismay of their respective families, as they were unmarried. This period was a relatively contented one for Kafka, who was able to live an independent life away from his family and, despite his continued ill health, and the financial constraints of living in Berlin during a period of rampant inflation (he had only a modest pension, on which he was drawing early because of his illness), Kafka and Dora were, for a time, happy.
Kafka had only published a few pieces during his lifetime, including a collection of short stories, The Country Doctor, and these were not financially successful, bringing him only a very small income in the form of royalties from his publisher, Kurt Wolff. Given his relative obscurity as a writer, many people have found it puzzling to realise that Kafka was unhappy at the thought of his unpublished work surviving him and being seen by others. In 1921 and 1922 he had made a decision that all of his works should be destroyed, which he mentioned to his close friend and executor Max Brod in conversation but also in writing. Later in life, Brod recounted his reply: ‘If you seriously think me capable of such a thing, let me tell you here and now that I shall not carry out your wishes.’10
Berlin, during the autumn of 1923, was cold and difficult to live in. With little money to live on, and with his fragile health declining, Kafka (and Diamant) had actually burned some of his notebooks together. At least this was the story that Diamant told Brod at the time of Kafka’s death, referring mainly to the notebooks that were with them during their time together in Berlin. Kafka had a habit of taking a notebook with him when walking around the city, and of buying new ones when he forgot to take one. Diamant destroyed around twenty notebooks at his behest – so she told Brod. But these notebooks were actually safe in Diamant’s bureau. She regarded them as her most important private possessions.11 Tragically, in March 1933, the Gestapo seized all the papers in her possession. Despite repeated attempts to find them, these notebooks, some thirty-five letters from Kafka to Diamant and the only copy of the text of a fourth novel, have never been found and were probably destroyed.12
However, despite this instance of destruction, a great deal of his literary work survived, the bulk of it still in his parents’ apartment in Prague, although Brod also found the covers of notebooks, their contents lost – presumably materials which were successfully destroyed by Kafka.
After his death, Brod pulled together Kafka’s papers from the hospital near Vienna where he had died, and from the room in his parents’ apartment in Prague where the writer had a desk. That process unearthed two notes from Kafka to Brod, which he published soon after Kafka’s death. The first gave very clear and unambiguous instructions:
Dearest Max
My final request: Everything I leave behind … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (from others and my own), sketches and so forth to be burned … unread as well as all writings and sketches you or others may have … If people choose not to give you letters, they should at least pledge to burn them themselves.
Yours, Franz Kafka13
Brod’s gathering process also produced a second note, but this one complicated the clear and simple instruction found in the first:
Dear Max,
This time I really may not get up again, the onset of pneumonia is certainly likely after the month of pulmonary fever, and not even writing it down will keep it at bay, although the writing has a certain power.
In this case, then, my last will regarding all my writings:
Out of everything I have written, the only ones that count are these books: Judgement, Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor, and the story Hunger Artist … When I say that those five books and the story count, I don’t mean that I have any wish for them to be reprinted and passed on to the future; on the contrary, if they should disappear completely, it would be in accordance with my real wish. But since they’re there, I’m not preventing anyone from keeping them if he wants to.
However, everything else of mine in writing … is without exception, insofar as it can be obtained or recovered from the recipients (you know most of the recipients, the main ones being Frau Felice M, Frau Julie née Wohryzek, and Frau Milena Pollak: and in particular don’t forget the few notebooks that Frau Pollak has) – all this is without exception and preferably unread (I won’t stop you from looking at it, I’d prefer if you didn’t, but in any case nobody else must see it) – all this is without exception to be burned, and I ask you to do so as soon as possible.
Franz14
Although these instructions are clear, they presented Brod with a serious dilemma, one that challenged the principles of friendship. Their friendship was long-standing. They had met in 1902 as students in the Charles University in Prague. Their intellectual powers were unequal, but they developed a personal relationship, which was marked by Brod’s devotion. He had an accomplished way of operating in the world which, combined with his admiration for his friend’s literary brilliance, enabled him to become a kind of ‘agent’ as Kafka tried to develop a literary career. Kafka’s poor health, his natural reticence and deep self-criticism would make this self-imposed task incredibly difficult. Despite these challenges, Brod would remain a constant friend, not only providing him with the encouragement necessary to see his literary work develop and appear in print, but also practical help in dealing with publishers.15
Brod’s dilemma was therefore clear: should he follow the final wishes of his friend, or should he allow his literary work to survive and seek a wider audience, something that he knew would have pleased Kafka? In the end, Brod chose to disobey his friend. In his defence he argued that Kafka would have known that Brod could not have gone through with the decision – if he had been really serious, he would have asked someone else to destroy the papers.
Brod was determined to provide Kafka with the place in literary culture that he felt he deserved, but which he had never realised in his lifetime. Brod was also aware of what Larkin would later refer to as the ‘magical’ quality of the manuscripts, and would use them to help forge this literary reputation. One story (perhaps the word ‘legend’ is the better term to use with Kafka) from Georg Langer recalls the visit of a writer to Brod in Tel Aviv in the 1940s. The writer had come to see the manuscripts of Kafka but was thwarted by a power cut. Even though the power was eventually reinstated, Brod refused to repeat the opportunity for the writer to see the manuscripts. Brod’s close guardianship of the archive, his efforts to get Kafka’s works published, and the biography of Kafka that he brought out in 1937, had all helped to create an amazing literary aura around Kafka (at least, initially, in German-speaking literary circles).16
Brod edited and arranged for the Berlin publisher Die Schmiede to publish The Trial in 1925, and he edited an unfinished work which Kafka’s original publisher Kurt Wolff would issue as The Castle (in German Der Schloss) in 1926. The novel America (Amerika) would also appear in 1927 having been ‘completed’ by Brod from Kafka’s working papers. Other works would follow that required more substantial editorial selection and compilation, from Kafka’s diaries and letters, all of which was only possible because Brod had the physical objects in his possession. They did not take up much space, but they provided an entire career to be created in posthumous form, establishing Kafka’s reputation as one of the greatest writers of modern times, but also providing Brod with an income and fame of his own.
English translations began to appear from 1930, the work of the Scottish literary couple Edwin and Willa Muir. Among the early readers in English were Aldous Huxley and W. H. Auden, both enthusiastic proponents of Kafka’s writing. They followed a list of European writers, especially Walter Benjamin and Berthold Brecht, who helped to build Kafka’s reputation in the interwar years. Had Brod not disobeyed his friend and destroyed the Kafka archive the world would have been deprived of one of the most original and influential literary voices of the twentieth century.
The Kafka archive has survived numerous dangers since Brod’s act of preservation in 1924. In 1938, with the Nazis poised to enter the city and impose their reign of anti-Semitism, Brod was on one of the last trains to leave the city, with suitcases full of papers. In the 1960s, with the Arab–Israeli conflict bringing the risk of bombing to the city where Kafka’s papers were being stored, Brod decided to move them to a bank vault in Switzerland. They rest now, largely, in three locations – the bulk of them in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, with other substantial portions in the Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach, Germany, and others in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. All three institutions are working together, dedicated to the preservation and sharing of Kafka’s extraordinary literary legacy.
The ethics of making decisions about the ‘curation’ of great literary works are complex and difficult. The deliberate destruction of Thomas Cromwell’s outgoing letters was a planned act of political expedience to protect him and his staff. But as a result, our understanding of a key historical figure has been dramatically reduced (until Hilary Mantel filled the gap with a mixture of imagination and research in her trilogy of novels). The burning of Byron’s memoirs may well have saved his devoted readership from shock and disgust at the time, but over the centuries the mystique of that lost work may well have added to his reputation as a writer ahead of his time, one whose life was as important as his work. The saving of Kafka’s archive has taken much longer to serve as an aid to his reputation. Only in relatively recent years has Brod’s curatorial decision been celebrated as a major contribution to the preservation of world culture. Imagine our culture without The Trial or Metamorphosis? We sometimes need the bravery and foresight of ‘private’ curators like Max Brod to help ensure the world has continued access to the great works of civilisation.